$6 plastic crown worn by Notorious B.I.G in his last photoshoot sells for $594,750 at auction

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The plastic crown worn by Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace in his last photo shoot sold for $594,750 (including Sotheby’s “buyer’s premium” fees and taxes) during an auction Tuesday night --despite its original $6 price tag.

At the auction house’s first hip-hop memorabilia auction, the crown’s original purchaser said he didn’t buy the it for its gold content and embedded jewels.

“This crown is a novelty item; I bought it at a place on Broadway called Gordon’s,” said Barron Claiborne, a 57-year-old photographer who lives in Brooklyn. Claiborne owned the crown and used it in the stunning Rap Pages magazine cover-photo he took of Biggie in 1997. “Without Biggie, the crown would not be worth it. I only paid six bucks for it.”

Speaking about the sale price, Claiborne said:“Some people have told me that it’s too low. That shows you how strong the symbol really is. I always thought Biggie was a king.”

In fact, he admitted the payday is a step up from what he earned for photographing the rapper.

“I’m not sure that I even got paid for it,” he said. “I was mostly shooting celebrities and reportage. I did this because I liked taking pictures of Biggie. The time before, I photographed him in a white suit — instead of the tracksuit that most rappers were wearing back in 1997.”

Amazingly, the royally inspired shot of Biggie Smalls — designed to illustrate yet another one of his nicknames: King of New York — almost didn’t happen. Sean 'Puffy' Combs, the owner of Bad Boy Records, the label for which Biggie recorded, was at the shoot and scoffed at Claiborne’s concept.

“He said it would make Biggie look like Burger King,” recalled Claiborne. “But Biggie didn’t listen. He wore it anyway. And nobody’s ever told me that they look at the photo and think the crown is plastic.”

That’s a testament to “the charisma of Biggie Smalls,” he said. “His power cancels out the fact that it is a novelty crown.”

At the time of the photo session, Biggie was in the middle of an East Coast-West Coast beef. Considering that none of the parties involved were, at the time, the types to settle differences in their lawyers’ conference rooms, things were life-or-death fraught. Inside Claiborne’s Grand Street studio, there were whispered concerns about an upcoming trip to Los Angeles.

“People were saying he shouldn’t go to California because of all the tension,” said the photographer, adding that Biggie died from gunshot wounds in LA on March 9, 1997 — three days after the session. “He had to be somewhat worried.”

The murder remains an open case.